Some questions about decode/encode

[glacier]

I use chinese charactors as an example here.

>>>s1='你好吗'
>>>repr(s1)
"'\\xc4\\xe3\\xba\\xc3\\xc2\\xf0'"
>>>b1=s1.decode('GBK')

My first question is : what strategy does 'decode' use to tell the way
to seperate the words. I mean since s1 is an multi-bytes-char string,
how did it determine to seperate the string every 2bytes or 1byte?


My second question is: is there any one who has tested very long mbcs
decode? I tried to decode a long(20+MB) xml yesterday, which turns out
to be very strange and cause SAX fail to parse the decoded string.
However, I use another text editor to convert the file to utf-8 and
SAX will parse the content successfully.

I'm not sure if some special byte array or too long text caused this
problem. Or maybe thats a BUG of python 2.5?